We're all aware of Taylor Swift's decision to remove her 1989 album from Spotify's streaming music catalog. There are many reasons that as a student of media and media markets, and as a musician myself, that I agree with and understand why this is a good thing. Spotify and Pandora barely pay anything out to the artists they stream and once those miniscule royalties are split between publishers, songwriters, and performers, there's little return for anyone involved in that process beyond the infrastructure provider. Aloe Blacc has a well-written article on Wired right now explaining his own experiences with the new streaming realities.

This works, truthfully, much the same way any traditional major label deal has worked in the past, just with much smaller payouts. The artist signs, gets a payment upfront, and begins recouping the expenses

Hi. I am 30 years old today. I made it through my twenties unscathed and pretty happy. We held an epic Yacht Rock party with 55 of our friends out on The Commodore, a riverboat that cruises down Lake Austin and the lower Colorado River (no, not that Colorado River. [ … ]

Last week I wrote a piece on the Bravery blog about why we don't mod premium themes for WordPress. The majority of the professional web development work that I do is on WordPress and has been for the past four or so years. Before that I did WordPress primarily as [ … ]

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to help my old high school out and redesign their website. I had done their website about three years ago and it was certainly beginning to show its age. So I offered to do the work pro bono as [ … ]

Tonight I moved my Ghost blog off of Digital Ocean and over to Ghost Pro (the hosted service by the people that built ghost). I did this for a few reasons, but the main one is that because Digital Ocean requires you point your DNS to their nameservers, they make [ … ]

It's become commonplace for me that, while I'm in the middle of a bunch of projects that start to drain my creativity, I work on some personal projects. Usually that involves things a lot more complicated than I probably should take on. So this week I started working on two [ … ]